New Home Automation Server

It’s time to replace my ageing home automation server with a new PC. You
can tell that the old one is dying because it’s started to slur its
words as it announces various events of interest like a car coming down
the driveway, or the fact that it announces an event 10 minutes after it
happened. I think the hard drive is provably failing again, seems to be
a design fault of that old small form factor Dell where it cooks the
hard drive.

Anyway, being somewhat conscious of the power consumed by my main
machine (a dual-proc Xeon 3.2GHz), I’ve been waiting anxiously for the
Pentium M or Core Duo chips to reach the desktop. Motherboards for both
have been around for sometime and there’s the odd news story about a
manufacturer in Japan actually shipping complete systems but until now
there’s been very little over here beyond the bare components and a DIY
assembly job.